The Golden Rule

Every time you press a button and switch on an electric light, remember that it was Mr. Edisons capacity for organizing relevant facts which made this possible.

Every time you hear a phonograph, remember that Mr. Edison is the man who made it a reality, through his persistent habit of dealing with relevant facts.

Every time you see a moving picture, remember that it was born of Mr. Edisons habit of dealing with important and relevant facts.

In the field of science relevant facts are the tools with which men and women work. Mere information, or hearsay evidence, is of no value to Mr. Edison; yet he might have wasted his life working with it, as millions of other people are doing. Hearsay evidence could never have produced the incandescent electric light, the phonograph or the moving picture, and if it had, the phenomenon would have been an accident.

In this lesson we are trying to prepare the student to avoid accidents. The question now arises as to what constitutes an important and relevant fact. The answer depends entirely upon what constitutes your definite chief aim in life, for an important and relevant fact is any fact which you can use, without interfering with the rights of others, in the attainment of that purpose.

All other facts, as far as you are concerned, are superfluous and of minor importance at most. However, you can work just as hard in organizing, classifying and using unimportant and irrelevant facts as you can in dealing with their opposites, but you will not accomplish as much. . . . . .

Up to this point we have been discussing only one factor of accurate thought, that which is based upon deductive reasoning. Perhaps this is the point at which some of the students of this course will have to think along lines with which they are not familiar, for we come, now, to the discussion of thought which does much more than gather, organize and combine facts.

Let us call this creative thought! That you may understand why it is called creative thought it is necessary briefly to study the process of evolution through which the thinking man has been created. Thinking man has been a long time on the road of evolution, and he has travelled a very long way.